3 Mystical Tools for Creative Entrepreneurs
Imbas Dispatch #29
A Chairde, Friends,
Today, I share three of my favourite tools that help me navigate the messy magic of being a creative entrepreneur. I love to dance between what our ancestors called ‘sous’, scientific or learned knowledge, and ‘imbas’, otherworldly wisdom that comes from the unseen realms, often arising within us as illumination, knowing or intuition.
As you’ll see, sous is taking what I’ve learned over the years through life experience and studies as the foundations, but then activating that fire in the head—the imbas—to create innovations from my higher self, from the field of soul.
This combination has helped me generate breakthroughs, fall utterly in love with my work time and time again and how it serves from soul, and steer the course of my dán, my soul’s journey. Each of these tools contributes to a sense of unfolding without always knowing the creative destination. They foster trust.
Trust is everything in this work.
1. Empathy Mantle
This is inspired by ‘empathy mapping’, a tool I learned from my innovation and UX days. The purpose is to empathise with who you are creating or designing for to identify their latent needs. These are the unspoken, unconscious desires that lie beneath the surface of our immediate awareness. Often we don’t know we have them and so when someone helps us to identify a latent need, it can radically enhance our lives.
That’s the sous part. Now for the imbas…
Long before the days of Hogwarts, the magical cloak or mantle flourished in Celtic lore, from the divine herbalist, Airmid and her mantle that holds the healing secrets of our native plants, to Manannán Mac Lir, the sea god whose cloak of invisibility takes on the iridescent colours of the ocean, to Brigid’s cloak that grows out behind her taking up space and challenging the ruling elite for sovereign land. The mantle, in our tradition, represents an extension of the energy of the wearer. Airmid’s mantle is Airmid’s energy.
Empathy mapping is similar to these magical cloaks in that it extends our awareness, allowing us to attune to both our own energetic field and those we wish to serve. You begin by first anchoring into what I call your dán-desire, whatever soulful creation is calling you to bring it to life. Using the symbol of the mantle like in the image below, you begin to understand what life is like for whoever you are creating for (this may just be yourself). What are the challenges they face without your creation? How might your creation meet a latent need and enhance their life? How might you and your energy transform in the creative process?
2. Eco-System Tree
An ecosystem is a tuath, a ‘tribe’ of living organisms that interact with each other and the physical environment that surrounds them. Each organism in the ecosystem works in relationship with another to fulfil their collective needs and function as a whole. There is a symbiosis, a ‘living together’ that enables the tuath to flourish.
The Eco-System Tree is a powerful tool that uses the symbology of a tree for creative business or project planning that feels organic and anchored in the natural wisdom of this land. Sure, we know the ancestors worshipped trees—tree lore is core to Celtic mythology, and trees are the foundation of our alphabet in ogham, the earliest form of written Gaelic.
The sous for this tool came from working for over a decade in global citizenship education, where my team and I created resources for teachers and youth workers to explore complex issues like climate justice in creative ways. This was originally a ‘problem-solution tree’ for brainstorming—roots representing the problems of a specific social justice issue, branches showing potential solutions.
In the Eco-System Tree, the roots of the tree represent the foundations of your project—it is where your tree sources its nutrients, where energy is stored, and where the unseen field of communication is. The trunk provides structured support for your tree and so represents the supports that you need for your creative project. The branches of a tree are its transportation system and help it take up space—they are your outreach, how will you share your creative project with the world? The leaves of a tree are where exchange happens, where the tree breathes, inhaling carbon dioxide and exhaling oxygen—this symbolises the exchange system in your creative project, exploring ideas around success, transformation, and celebration.
3. Alchemical Rooms Activation
This is a guided journey I developed to temper creative blocks that arise, and not only temper them, but to throw them into the alchemical fire. This came in a deep co-creative space with the Otherworld (even as I write this, a candle burns by my laptop and I ritually opened up the space to work co-creatively with the ancestors—I do this for everything). What I saw in the vision was a Bean Feasa, a wise curing woman’s house at the edge of the woods. As I entered, I realised the house itself was the Bean Feasa—she wasn’t a person, she was the dwelling. Like in a dream, a house can be a symbol of our psyche.
I was guided through four rooms, each representing an alchemical stage. The first room was dark as night, symbolising the alchemical nigredo, the inner-Samhain. A fire appeared in the room and I was encouraged to give over to the fire whatever was paining me in my creative process for transmutation. I watched this pain burn, then collected the ashes in a small cauldron as a door appeared into the next room. This was a lunar room, all white like the alchemical albedo, the inner-Imbolc. In the centre of this room was a well to purify the ash. The final two rooms were a bright yellow solar room, symbolising the alchemical citrinitas, the inner-Bealtaine, where new life began to rise from the ashes, followed by the red room, the alchemical rubedo or inner-Lughnasa, as new blood flushed and I re-emerged from the Bean Feasa’s house pulsing with this potential.
A guided audio journey flowed from this experience that can be used even on a bus while feeling triggered or blocked not only by the creative process, but by life itself.
Celtic Creativity Course
All of these tools (and much more) feature in-depth in my upcoming creativity course, Celtic Soul Garden, where you can learn to combine your own flavour of sous and imbas rooted in ancestral seasonal wisdom, mythwork, dreamwork and bodywork for a flourishing creative life where you feel alive to your dán and vibrating with that essential trust. As one recent participant said, ‘My soul has been longing to be part of something like this.’ If you’ve already booked your space on this course, buÃochas ó chroÃ, I hope you are fizzing with excitement!
The course runs from 11th August–3rd October 2025. If time zones, holidays etc. are a challenge, don’t worry—you don’t have to make all of the live calls as we will have our own private interactive portal. Payment plans and the option of 1-1 mentoring with me are also available.
I hope these tools bring glimmers of inspiration wherever this finds you today. From my creative soul to yours.
Croà isteach,
Jen x
Thank you for sharing these!
Gorgeous! And perfect timing. I'm sitting down today to do some dreaming and creating for the stories as well as my own community space... thank you for these tools! Sending you so much love sister ✨💚